“Anti-Zionism is not Anti-Semitism.” Oh, yeah?

Sha’i ben-Tekoa

Photo by Cole Keister on Unsplash

How common it is now in this generation for Jew-haters to claim they are not antisemites because they have nothing against the Jewish religion. They say they are against Zionism, which is a political ideology and policy.

The ignorance of the Jew-hater is vast. Antisemitism never had anything to do with the Jewish religion, because it came to life in a generation when religion was seriously on the way out. The 19th century in Europe was the third in the span of the Enlightenment, which was a euphemism for the loss of faith in Christianity by a significant number of its intellectuals, e.g. Voltaire, Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Charles Darwin. In mid-century, Karl Marx dismissed religion altogether as a narcotic. Sigmund Freud called it an illusion.

Thus, it is an historical howler to classify thousands of years of Christian and Muslim Jew-hatred as “antisemitism” for the simple reason the term did not exist until the late 19th century. It is ahistorical malpractice to label Jew-hatred before then as “anti-Semitic.”

The word emerged as the successor to Christian Jew-hatred because once a hater loses his belief in the divinity of Jesus as God/Messiah, he can no longer revile Jews as Christ-killers.

But he still hates them. While the Emancipation gave Jews legal status as citizens, that is not to be confused with gentiles being comfortable with their new presence in the public square. In 1819, in Germany, university students rioted in protest against having to sit in lecture halls next to a Jew.

For thousands of years, they had been religiously hated, but in the Enlightenment, religion was now irrelevant. Ergo, the invention of “anti-Semitism” that borrowed and perverted a term from Philology, the academic study of languages. The problem with the Jews was now not their religion but their race — when Jews are not a race and never were. The Jews were rebranded as no longer a nation punished for killing G-d Who scattered them around the world. They were reconceptualized as a race, which is an immutable biological condition having nothing to do with religion or nationality.

The very term at birth was as stupid and deceitful a neologism as today’s homophobia, Islamophobia and transphobia. It was the age of Darwin and European, imperial colonists coming in contact with distant, exotic peoples. It saw the birth of the academic study of Anthropology. What the post-religious haters did was pilfer from the study of languages the term Shemitic (sic) that academics had invented to label Hebrew and cognate languages, after Shem, the son of Noah (over time the “h” fell away). The new Jew-haters also imagined the ahistorical myth that in the past there were Semites, when there never were. There is no historical evidence of such a people calling themselves Semites and being called that by others.

The earliest reference to “Semite” in the “Bible” of the English Language, the OED (Oxford English Dictionary, 1932) is 1813: “A person belonging to the race of mankind which includes most the of peoples mentioned in Genesis X as descended from Shem son of Noah as the Hebrews, Arabs, Assyrians and Arameans.”

This contains two egregious errors. One is calling the Arabs descendants of Shem. Clearly, in the Torah, Ishmael, the first Arab, was the son of Abraham descended from Shem, but not his mother. And Jews practice matrilineal descent. His mother Hagar was an Egyptian, a descendant of Ham, as was Ishmael’s wife that Hagar mother chose for him. He was not Semitic but Hamitic and his Arab descendants no less.

The other major mistake is calling the Jews a race, which became fashionable in the Enlightenment – when there is nothing in the Jewish religion about race being a component of membership in the nation. On the contrary, Adolph Hitler hated the Jews because he said they were a mongrel people who cared nothing for racial purity. And in truth, during the eighteen centuries of the Exile, Jews all over the whole world accepted converts, married them, had children, and when Zionism came to life, Jews made aliyah from 130 different countries sporting all the skin colors known to man, texture of the hair, shape of the eye, and they married one another. Israelis are arguably the most racially-mixed people on earth.

The irony of history? In 1930s Germany, the Jews were seen as not caring about race; today the Jewish state is believed to be home to racial purists, whose ideology of Zionism is all about racist Jewish supremacy. Today Israel is smeared and sneered at as an apartheid state. The Jews have gone from being indifferent to race to being the worst racists on the planet.

The new, post-Christian Jew-haters in the 19th century rebranded Jews a race which is a biological condition and reconfigured them as Asiatics, which made them as alien to European societies as black Africans. It was now their race and their Asiatic culture as Semites that Europeans recoiled from (or so they told themselves.)

The neologism “anti-Semitism” was from the start a dishonest absurdity because it implies the existence of such a thing as Semitism, when there never was such an ism.

Zionism is the political ideology that supports the right of Jews to live in a self-governing, Jewish-majority state on less than half of their ancient homeland because throughout their tortuous history and the multiplicity of bloody massacres in it which commonly were ignited by the gentile governments they lived under as a minority. Those people today who oppose to Zionism, therefore, support denying to the tiny-in-population Jewish people a Jewish-majority state.

In effect, the anti-Zionist dooms Jews to the eternal status of vulnerable minority living on sufferance under gentile-majority governments.

This is why today’s anti-Zionist is most certainly “anti-Semitic” in its modern (if not original) usage, meaning “hateful of Jews,” a hatred the haters try to cover up with the patently anti-Jew term “anti-Zionist,” when anti-Zionism is Jew-hatred par excellence.

PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the ““Palestinians”” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.